“What’s The Most Ridiculously Absurd Way You’ve Seen Someone Get Rich In No Time?” (30 Answers)
“Get rich quick” schemes are, by and large, just that schemes, where the only one getting rich is the person selling the idea in the first place. After all, solid businesses can go under and the invisible hand of the market can make established companies struggle, so conventional wisdom would suggest that getting rich is a combination of hard work, perseverance and a dash of luck.
Someone asked “What’s the most ridiculously absurd way you’ve seen someone get rich in no time?” and people shared their best examples. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorites, take some notes and be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments section below.

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My uncle invented micro machines. Little toy cars in the early 90’s.
EDIT: when I see my uncle next I will show him this and all the people he brought joy to.
Nope. They were around in the 80's, invented in 1987. Also there wre 3 inventors behind it. Simple Google search confirms this too.
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Kim Kardashian f****d a low rent rapper and got her mom to sell the tape. As far as ridiculous and absurd goes this is about as good as it gets. .
Kim, and her mom got the idea from the Paris Hilton sextape. Kim worked for Paris, as an assistant, and fell in love with wealth. This the “leaked” kardashian tape.
Load More Replies...But then she went and married Kanye. Out of the frying pan into the fire
Not gonna happen. Election isn't won via popular vote. If it was, Oprah would've gone on years ago.
Load More Replies...They were already filming the TV show when the tape was released so they'd have been famous anyway - the people who watched the show weren't watching because of the tape and I'm pretty certain that people interested in the tape wouldn't have watched the show just because of that. They had an audience regardless.
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I find the Kardashian has inspiring. If anyone has a bad day watch that and you feel like Einstein.
My cousin recorded the audio of a fan for 8 hours about a decade ago and now has north of a billion “white noise” YouTube views and is one of the top podcasts on Spotify.
White noise has been popular for years. There is research that shows different types of White noise helps with different types of sleeping problems (racing thoughts, to do list type thoughts, etc.)
Too bad any sort of noise while i try to sleep just drives me crazy. When I was a kid we still had those old big TVs and I swear they made a humming noise even on standby. I always unplugged the one I had in my bedroom.
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A friend of mine once struck it rich overnight by selling "designer" pet rocks online, complete with little outfits and backstories. It was a wild idea that somehow took off!
I wanted a pet rock when I was a child, but my parents wouldn't buy one for me. Fortunately, I was able to adopt a stray I found on the side of the road.
This was a fad from the 70's. I had a pet rock when I was a kid. There weren't any outfits or backstories though. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2018/12/05/pet-rocks/
I remember the pet rock crazed in the 70's. I briefly thought about buying one. Never did.
Go to work for a little startup called Dell straight after college in Austin, Texas in the 80s. Get a bunch of meaningless ‘future shares’ as a sort of ‘welcome to this startup’ sweetener. Work there for a while, company goes public, meaningless shares were suddenly worth a fortune. Epitome of ‘right place at the right time’.
Worked for software company late nineties. They grew so big so fast, the couldnt calculate raises until April. So they gave us stock as backpay. Not a fortune but wont be eating ramen when i retire.
Real Ramen is good and expensive, you probably mean instant noodles :)
Load More Replies...I work in tax. Client says he just was awarded damages by US court for his employee shares while working for a big tech company. $48m usd worth. He and others only got half the us workers entitlement. He then wasnt sure how it woukd be taxed. It wasnt. He won twice.
Forgot that he mined a dozen or so Bitcoins over a decade ago on his spare notebook.
Remembered three years ago that he still had that laptop in a drawer.
My uncle's company made wood shaving tools. One day martha stewart used one to grate cheese on her tv show. Thus the Microplane was born.
This is not what I read happened. Edit: OPs statement.
Load More Replies...Gearpatrol.com and microplaneintl.com record the microplane doing very well before Martha, Julia Child, Rachael Ray and others started using it.
It's definitely an obvious "invention" that shouldn't have a patent. Cheese graters have been around for a very long time, and Stanley started selling the Surform in the 1950s. Untitled-6...50fa98.jpg
I once knew a guy who bought a lottery ticket on a whim while waiting in line for coffee. He won, quit his job, and spent the next year traveling the world on a “find myself” tour. He came back with a massive tattoo of a pineapple on his chest and a story that made him richer in life than most millionaires. Turns out, the real jackpot was the freedom to be absurd.
Sure. Most people don't necessarily want to be rich - they just want enough money not to worry.
I want to be rich. Mostly so I can also travel all the time.
Load More Replies...People don't want a million dollars, they want to spend a million dollars. Many lottery winners end up bankrupt.
Friend of mine started selling her socks after wearing them at her retail job. She started making $7k a month just from that alone.
Some people have a sexual fetish for them. Offshoot of a foot fetish. As long as they are not hurting anyone then, no kink shaming here.
Load More Replies...I'm ceratin there are people into that, give it a go!
Load More Replies...Just read the comments, oy. And here was me thinking she was knitting them...
Really? Not that I'm into it, but it would be the opposite way round for me. There's far more...stuff...possibly on underwear than socks, even if socks traditionally smell more.
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The person who made bank by livestreaming themselves sleeping on TikTok. Literally getting paid to nap—today’s dream job!
Would I get rich if I livestream myself mindlessly browsing BP for hours?
An idea based on John Lennon and Yoko Ono having a “bed-in” and releasing the video?
Ok so university lecturer at my uni, he was a deep sea biologist. He was given a sea slug which had been collected on an automated underwater vehicle dive.
In the mucus of this sea slug, he isolated a bacteria which produced a protein digesting enzyme which worked at low temperatures. He sold this biological enzyme to one of the big company's I think proctor and gamble.
The whole "wash your clothes at 30/ low temperatures" biological washing powder etc. that was him .
Went from driving a ford escort,.to a jaguar, to retiring in about a week.
Only if it was a university sponsored trip he was on. But if someone just gave it to him, then they wouldn't have any rights to it
Load More Replies...This sea slug enzyme was later found to regenerate cells and even whole biological structures. Even complex ones such rebuilding a severed hand. It was later corrupted to harvest living matter from hosts in order to produce a byproduct substance called ADAM, which could be used to alter the genetics of humans.
The guy that made the Million Dollar Website.
Selling 1 pixel advertisements for 1$ must be some of the most absurdly genius ways of making loads of money.
Novel concept, some people need to be a part of things. For $1, its not bad
Friend of an friend sold d***s in the early 2010s. Some sales were done in bitcoin. Went to jail for five years and came out with a what was now a few million in Bitcoin that he didn't touch during it's biggest booms. I suppose it took a decade but what had seemed like a huge f**k up left him an accidental millionaire and meant he didn't need to return to a life of crime when he got out. Went on to live a frugal lifestyle as a humble "crypto trader".
I was freaking out at first because I thought he was cutting D!℃Ks off cadavers or something and selling them. Took me a minute to realize it was drµgs. I think I might be damaged...
He and his brother developed an online game where two cowboys walk away from each other, then turn around and shoot and one dies.
The game was entirely automated. You could just bet money on who wins, and if you got it right you would x1.95 your money, with 5% going to the house.
They got unfathomably rich. Saw them race sports cars around the world. Last time I checked though, they went to prison for tax fraud.
'...they went to prison for tax fraud' is an example of when so much is not enough.
My brother's friend worked minimum wage jobs. Then he and his wife started buying lube in large quantities from overseas and repackaging it in much smaller quantities in their garage and reselling it on Amazon.
Really just classic middleman stuff, but they made SO MUCH money that they quit their day jobs almost immediately and haven't looked back.
Many people buy stuff from overseas and resell it for a profit. Just wish they would make sure it's safe first
Do y’all remember silly bandz? My friend’s dad came up with rainbow silly bandz and became a millionaire from that.
God! I HATED those d@mned things! They were all over the house for ages!
I went to high school with Bo Burnham. One day he had a youtube video go viral. Like a week later he was represented by the same agent as Drew Carey.
Ironically, the kid who joked about being unpopular was suddenly really popular due to the success from his jokes.
I hope he's okay. I don't know that it was true autobiography, but his Netflix special made it sound like the pandemic was rough and he was dealing with a lot of s**t.
He also took a several year break because of depression and I'm glad he's doing better now.
A good friend of mine started trading stocks after retirement. He trades ETFs everyday in his underwear. He does it all on his phone or ipad. He retired 3 yrs ago. So far this year he's made $1.3 million. It is ridiculous.
Compound interest earns more over the long term than day trading. Three suggestions: 1) open a high yield savings account. (there are many, I recommend Synchrony, but there are others, not affiliated, just a happy customer) 2) pay yourself first out of your paycheck. A budget will help you determine what you can afford, but carve it out first. 3) any 401k your work offers and matches, means you need to max out your contribution. While you are at it get a ROTH. I like Fidelity, not affiliated. You can put money into their SPAXX fund, which is a money market earning the same as a high yield, so you are building a balance, earning interest, and then you can begin to learn which investments you want to put your money into. There's a guy on Youtube who used to be a teacher who now runds a lot of shorts on how he did it, he's on insta, too. 10 years from now, some plastic tchotchke will be forgotten, your fancy car will depreciate, but you will have a chunk of change.
Load More Replies...Not rich but my friend told me about how he went to the strip club one night downtown. He stayed until 3:00 a.m. and then when he left, he walked outside to find a ton of $20 bills just blowing in the wind down the street, so he grabbed as much as he could. He couldn't explain where it came from, no one was around at the time and the streets were empty.
When I was little, me and my brother found a load of 10 and £20 notes shoved in a hedge and on the pavement in our tiny village as we were walking home from the park one day. Mum sent us back to look if there were any more deeper in the hedge and there was!
Interesting choice of words given the location...lmao
Load More Replies...Terrible idea. That can be a strategy for LOTS of different crimes. He's lucky nothing happened to him.
I dropped something on the floor whilst going through security for Eurostar at Lille. As it's not a terminus every one is rushing to make the train. I realise there's money on the floor so I scoop it up as I assume I dropped it. It's only when we're boarding I realise it's hundreds of Euro but also covered in dust. We did make an announcement on the train in case anyone had reported the loss but by the dust I reckon it had been there a good long while and not necessarily all from one person.
Plot twist: It was his money that he didn't spend at the strip club because the ladies just gave it back to him.
A friend was employee number 8 at a tech startup and resigned after they listed on the stock exchange with $35 million.
My oldest niece was employee #6 at Oracle. She cashed out her stocks at age 30, and hasn’t had to work since.
Reading these makes me so mad. I worked at Kinko's fully expecting them to go public. What did they do? Get bought out by FedEx. Story of my life.
I once watched a guy turn his viral TikTok dance challenge into a million-dollar merchandise line overnight. He just tossed on a silly costume, danced like nobody was watching, and somehow convinced everyone that wearing a chicken suit while moonwalking was the new black. Now I’m left wondering if I should start practicing my own absurd dance moves or just invest in rubber chickens.
When I dance, it looks like I'm walking backwards up stairs. No one wants to see that except maybe melon musk.
A classmate in high school climbed and subsequently fell off a electric transmission tower and got hurt pretty bad. Even though he was an idiot, because there were no warning signs or a fence around it he received a bunch of money as a legal settlement from the electric company.
One of the reasons I'm happy to live in Switzerland is that logic and personal responsibility is still applied here. If you need a sign not to climb a electric transmission tower than maybe Darwin is talking to you from the grave... We once had a tourist trying to sue a local ski rent shop because he fell (while skiing) and broke his leg. The judge dismissed the case in under 30sec...
Another reason to be sad that moving to Switzerland is hard.
Load More Replies...It's like the toaster with the warning label "DO NOT USE IN BATHTUB" or my first curling iron that said "Caution: Gets very hot. Can cause burns!"
I'm waiting for the warnings on electrical outlets that say "Do Not Insert Tongue." Or "Please turn the mixer off before licking the beaters."
Load More Replies...Haven't you ever heard the old saying "God takes care of drunks and fools"?
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A small time YouTuber (think under 500 subscribers) I personally knew used to make RuneScape videos. One day he decided to change things up and do Creepypasta readings. Bam, went viral and had 10,000 subscribers in two videos. Last I checked he's just shy of a million.
YouTuber is somebody uploading videos to YouTube. Subscribers are people that like what that person does, so they subscribe to their channel to get a notification that new video was made. RuneScape was (maybe still is) a free MMORPG. Creepypasta are scary stories, you can find them on Reddit easily. Going viral is when people start sharing your content without your contribution. Shy of million in this case probably means that this YouTuber has nearly a million of subscribers.
Load More Replies...A day time TV show many years ago about flipping repossessed houses bought at auction where they showed three folks/couples buying a house, fixing it up and selling it. One chap bought two houses but did nothing to them, didn't even clean them. All he did was sell them at market value and made a bunch since the auction price was peanuts. The show edited it as if he was new to the flipping house game so maybe he'd have a better go the next episode even though his profit was more than the other folks. The next two episode he did the same thing with another seven houses before the production team realised that he had no intention of doing anything to any house and was only there to use the production crew's contacts and for them to do a lot of the legwork as required for the show. He made over £100k+ on nine houses with doing barely anything. The show stopping dealing with him after that.
More than douchey, house-flipping is illegal. It’s illegal because it drives up the cost of housing. It’s just one of those laws that doesn’t get enforced, sadly.
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My ex back in high school (2015-2016) invested in bitcoin. he made really good profit then promptly spent it on the largest amount of d***s i’ve ever seen in my life. i mean stacks upon stacks of it. he rarely sold and just ran through it all with him and his two friends in like a month.
there’s reasons we aren’t together anymore….
Bro had an idea, patented it, pitched it to the owner of gopro, got 2.3 million for it
hes a good guy, but i am still a bit jealous.
Big lotto winners who aren't satisfied and keep buying more lotto tickets and win *again*.
I don't mean a mil or 2.. but those megaball types who hit 10 or more, then play and win million+ like a year later.
If I win the lottery, I won't tell anyone, but there will be signs. Like the DeLorean in my driveway.
or two baked beans on my toast, rather than the usual one.
Load More Replies...A friend of a friend was at the rubbish dump with a friend and found a bag filled with a bunch of cash. They split it and he hid it under his bed then used it to pay tradies and stuff. Very dodgy but sounds like something from a book.
How many hours you putting in at the rubbish dump?
Load More Replies...A house in a low-income neighbourhood caught fire. This copywriting whiz that was also a community leader started a campaign to raise funds for the family, purely on Whatsapp. He raised 200K over 2 days and handed all the money to them within the 3rd day.
I germany during covid basically everyone was allowed to start a covid test station and anyone could go there and get tested and even had to get tested to go to work. But what a lot of people did they just collected hundreds of names family friends and distant relatives and booked them daily as tested. And the german goverment paid them around 15 € per test. People in bigger citys made millions without even testing anyone.
A friend of mine used an app to create a bunch of different notebooks and diaries using free templates, then sold them through Amazon. Amazon would supply the books, print the covers onto them and sell them while my friend sat back and got paid for minimal effort. Doesn't really work anymore but they made enough to not need to worry about that.
PPP & ERC money during the pandemic! The general public doesn’t really understand how much money was handed out.
Much corruption in the UK. Government ministers handing vast amounts to their friends..
One reason (among many) for the change in Government at the last elections was the utter bungling of PPE sourcing and distribution. It was so inept and so corrupt it was sickening. People died as a result of scumbags giving their friends contracts.
Load More Replies...Selling immediately the land they inherited from their parents. it funny and ironic how the older generation kept the land and took care of it thinking about their kid's future that they have a place, a land to build a house on only yo be sold right away because their kids prefer the money more. My cousins already sold their portion of land even though their mom is still alive and is not fully subdivided yet. it was a mess.
If I won the lottery or found out I had a now dead rich relative I'd buy land. If I had lots of land but needed money I'd sell some of the land to get money. It's all a matter of balance. I only need 5 or 10 thousand square feet to have a house, and depending on where it is selling 1 to 10 acres can pay at least an adequate house. Once all the bills are paid using extra money for privacy and land preservation seems like a good thing.
Load More Replies...Runescape - Someone I know made millions selling and buying gp (the currency of runescape) then got served cease and desist letters by the game makers (jagex) so sold his company to a competitor with a royalty deal.
I once read about this guy who bought a bunch of rare Beanie Babies back in the day and flipped them for thousands.
Everyone else who read the same story bought all the common ones, flipped them for nothing, and hurled them into landfills. By definition, there can only ever be a very few people who trade rare commodities.
Telling them about Bitcoin and watching them go buy 20 plus a bunch of Ethereum.
Sorry but how dies one make money by watching ppl but bitcoin? I have no idea how that works. If I can make money by watching ppl buy stuff I want to know.
It doesn't really work anymore. But In 2010 bitcoin was worth about $0.40 a piece, by 2014 it was up to $300, in 2016 it jumped to $985....but by 2017 they were worth $20,000 each. Today the price topped off at $73,000 per coin, meaning 20 would be worth $1.46 million.
Load More Replies...Didn't one of the early investors/co-founders of Facebook (not Zuck) write a book about how fundamentally broken the current tech/capital markets are that he was able to amass >$1B fortune by doing just a few months' work?
This one? https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-accidental-billionaires-9781409069508
Friend of a friend found 23 bitcoins on an old hard drive in 2017 which he got for selling some mtg cards he had from high school on mt gox in 2012, sold the btc in 17 then put it all in tesla at 70 Euros pre-split. He's dumb as a brick, i remember helping him get the coins off mt gox 12 years ago. FWIW his mtg cards would now also be worth well north of 75k. He bought a house for around a million and paid in cash a couple of years ago, drives a top specced Q7 and smokes 5g of weed a day every day. I go to clubs with him occasionally and with a designated driver around he gets everyone hammered on the most expensive stuff they have available. He's a good guy but he is completely convinced he deserves everything he has and he was bound to get rich one way or the other.
It is not? I need 2 weeks to smoke that . Most smokers I know do about 1 gram per day.
Load More Replies...Both the Cash Me Outside and Hawk Tuah girls.
People aren't paying HT girl for making a (pretty low-class) comment. They are paying her because she has (at least a little) of the indefinable quality that makes some people charismatic on camera. She's trading on it quickly while the opportunity is there. She will probably disappear without trace, but you never know, she might be the next Oprah.
A relative of mine cheated on her husband with a really rich dude and then went on to marry him. Does that count?
Became friends with some dudes in college who turned out to be the founding members of Dude Perfect. He’s now a regular and just won an Emmy for shows he’s done for them.
Another is Britney Dawn, just google her. It’s a whole thing. The crazy thing is realizing both these people went to the same high school, in the same year. In a class of like 100 people.
Selling used bath water.
WHAT. Holy s**t it's true 🤣: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/12/05/meet-21-year-old-londoner-made-10-million-selling-bathwater/
Ring tones...
I can't believe I used to pay for ring tones. I have my phone permanently on silent now.
Pointy hat on YouTube worked for it but still 2 years to a second income while working full time is a great fall back. Many of his coworkers don't realize he makes more in a one day shoot that they make all week.
Someone in my close family circle made a company around cryptocurrency security, it was worth 75 millions euros 6 months after and 1,5 bn 5 years later. Kinda fast.
Roaring Kitty, obviously.
Somebody got over a hard bump in his computer biz by selling Nu Skin in multi level marketing. Then he hit the jackpot.
Get elected as a politician.
Distant acquaintance was in China before Covid kicked in and anticipated the need for masks. Back home he went to his bank but they didn’t want to give him money so he borrowed 100k from local d**g cartel to buy a container load of masks from China. Fast forward 2 months and these masks were worth 2.5 million. He paid back his depth and is a rich man now.
Pretty bad**s move though.
I call bull! Anyone caught selling the N95 masks for more than market value was arrested and charged. Yes, demand was through the roof, but because essential workers NEEDED them. IF it happened, I can't imagine he wasn't caught
I don't know if l'm inspired or perplexed. What's clear though is that hard work won't take you too far 🙄
Exactly. Mostly happenstance and who you know. Must be nice!
Load More Replies...I knew about Bitcoin when it first started in the 90's, and it took 1000 to buy a pizza. Saw it as just a whacky web fad. Now, if I had just bought $100 worth when it was valued at 1 cent each...... Grrrr!
Lost Blockchain Funds Recovery with Web Bailiff Contractor In recent years, online investment schemes have proliferated, luring unsuspecting individuals into their traps. I found myself caught in one such scheme while living in Évreux, France, my ordeal serves as a cautionary tale for others.It all began step by step.A friend I met on Discord shared a seemingly lucrative investment opportunity. The promise of quick returns and minimal risk was enticing, and I was eager to make some extra money. Like many others, I believed I could navigate this new world of online investments safely. Unfortunately, I was wrong.I invested €2,500, convinced I was making a smart financial move. Initially, everything seemed legitimate. I received frequent updates and saw my "earnings" grow on the platform. The operators were friendly and responsive, further building my confidence in their legitimacy. I was excited about the potential profits and began to share the opportunity with others, not realizing I
I have a memory of an Oprah Winfrey show from perhaps the late 1990s where a woman talked about her "invention" which was dirt on a can that you were supposed to eat and then lose weight. I think she called it slimming dirt or something? Does anybody know about this and how the woman's business went after being on the Oprah show????
My uncle invented a deep cleaner he called "Michaelbath" which most people know as Janitor In A Drum. Major bucks.
I don't know if l'm inspired or perplexed. What's clear though is that hard work won't take you too far 🙄
Exactly. Mostly happenstance and who you know. Must be nice!
Load More Replies...I knew about Bitcoin when it first started in the 90's, and it took 1000 to buy a pizza. Saw it as just a whacky web fad. Now, if I had just bought $100 worth when it was valued at 1 cent each...... Grrrr!
Lost Blockchain Funds Recovery with Web Bailiff Contractor In recent years, online investment schemes have proliferated, luring unsuspecting individuals into their traps. I found myself caught in one such scheme while living in Évreux, France, my ordeal serves as a cautionary tale for others.It all began step by step.A friend I met on Discord shared a seemingly lucrative investment opportunity. The promise of quick returns and minimal risk was enticing, and I was eager to make some extra money. Like many others, I believed I could navigate this new world of online investments safely. Unfortunately, I was wrong.I invested €2,500, convinced I was making a smart financial move. Initially, everything seemed legitimate. I received frequent updates and saw my "earnings" grow on the platform. The operators were friendly and responsive, further building my confidence in their legitimacy. I was excited about the potential profits and began to share the opportunity with others, not realizing I
I have a memory of an Oprah Winfrey show from perhaps the late 1990s where a woman talked about her "invention" which was dirt on a can that you were supposed to eat and then lose weight. I think she called it slimming dirt or something? Does anybody know about this and how the woman's business went after being on the Oprah show????
My uncle invented a deep cleaner he called "Michaelbath" which most people know as Janitor In A Drum. Major bucks.
